Sing Mother Goose & Sing in Praise

I have been surprised by the amount of music in the early Caldecott winner and honor books. There have been many stories that include a song or two as part of the book, like... Juanita by Leo Politi (Caldecott Honor 1949)

However Sing Mother Goose (Caldecott honor 1946) and Songs of Praise (Caldecott honor 1947) both by Opal Wheeler and illustrated by Marjorie Torrey don't have just one or two songs - they are illustrated collections of music.
See the video below for a closer look.

 For me the strength of the illustrations in these two books is the color palette and the rich feel on the full color pages. 

On Wednesday nights we head over to my In-Laws' for Family Dinner Night. Cupcake likes to sing at the piano with grandma. Her favorite song is "One Foot Other Foot" from the Rodgers and Hammerstein musical "Allegro" - mostly because it has a baby in the illustrations on that page, but she was ok with trying a few selections from Sing Mother Goose this past Wednesday.
(Sorry for the sound quality - I like to record "stress-free" style using my phone.)





After Cupcake lost interest and went to find out what the older cousins were up to downstairs (Wii Resort Sports, just in case you were wondering about the background noise in the video above), my Mother-In-Law played a piece from Songs of Praise.  
Notice the much more interesting looking "Songs We Sing", a collection of show tunes by Rodgers and Hammerstein from 1957.





Another plug for my awesome Mother-In-Law who is a fabulous person and blogs at HomesMSP about real estate and the Minneapolis/St Paul area.


Each Wednesday in a feature called Wednesdays Unplugged she posts about our family and a recipe from our weekly family dinner night.



Interested in joining us on the Caldecott Medal and Honor Book Reading Challenge? Find out more here.

I'm a Chair!

A dream I have been working toward (for what feels like a long time now) came true yesterday when the executive board of the Minnesota Youth Reading Awards voted to start a new Children's Choice Picture Book Award.

For the past 30 years, MN has had a wonderful Children's Choice award for Novels - the Maud Hart Lovelace Award, but not one for picture books.

The following order of business at the meeting was to vote me in as the chair of this new award!
I still want to squeal a little bit each time I think about it.

I am thrilled and honored to be leading the creating and shaping of this new award for Minnesota.

This next year will be a lot of work behind the scenes with nominees announced for participants in April of 2013.

Would YOU like to be a part of this new Minnesota award?
Over the next few months we will be looking for Representatives from around the state who would like to provide input on the potential nominees. If this sounds right up your alley, click here.

A Visit to Mineapolis Central for 5 Rare Caldecott Honor Books

On Sunday the Bud and I took a trip to the Minneapolis Central  Public Library. They have a permanent reference collection called Milestones that seems to house every Caldecott Medal and Honor book.

The Bud loved the awesome, interactive entrance.

From what I gathered, at certain times the collection is browse-able (based on staffing), but when we were there I had the librarian pull titles for me. 

Fish in the Air by Kurt Wiese

Caldecott Honor (1949)

This was actually a very cute, entertaining  story about a boy named Fish, who likes things shaped like fish to go with his name: shoes, lanterns, etc. But when he gets the biggest possible kite shaped like a Fish, he gets pulled up into the air and flies about town.

What I really didn't like is that the images are very stylized in a way that feels like stereotypes, and all of the skin color is bright yellow.

I have a feeling that I will have the same concern with his other honor book, You Can Write Chinese from 1946.

Good Luck Horse by Chih-Yi Chan, Plato Chan (Illustrator)

Caldecott Honor (1944)

This is a very rambling story about a horse made from paper that, with the aid of magic, is turned into a real horse. The horse is alternately good luck and then bad luck and ends being good luck.

The most interesting thing about this book is that the illustrations were drawn by a 12 year old Chinese boy. I photographed the foreword (below) which explains this - click to make the photos larger. That makes Plato Chan the youngest illustrator to win a Caldecott Honor!

There is more interesting information about the young illustrator on this blog post from Collecting Children's Books.

Little Lost Lamb by Golden MacDonald (pseudonym for Margaret Wise Brown)

Caldecott Honor (1946)

This is a sweet story about a little black lamb, this only black sheep in the flock, runs off with a mind of it's own and gets lost.

I really like the mountain scenes and how once the lamb runs off and is lost, it gets dark and the pictures change from color to black and white creating a nice effect.

Bambino the Clown by Georges Schreiber

Caldecott Honor (1948)

I'm not really a fan of clowns, they creep me out a bit. An this book did nothing to change that for me.

In fact the opening creeped me out before there was any clown action: 

A strange old man finds a boy crying near a tree. The boys has lost his hat. So the man says come home with me and I will get you and even better one. So the boy goes with him!

If I read this with any children, we would definitely need to have a chat about stranger danger!

Pierre Pidgeonby Lee Kingman 

Caldecott Honor (1944)

This was my favorite of the 5 books I read at Minneapolis Central. I really like the illustration style, the sense of place, and the focused storyline that has a connection between the illustration and the text that appears on the page (so not the case with many of the early Medal and Honor books!)

Take a closer look in the video below.

Interested in joining us on the Caldecott Medal and Honor Book Reading Challenge? Find out more here.

The Ageless Story by Lauren Ford

The Ageless Story

by Lauren Ford

Caldecott Honor (1940)

The vocalist and all around fabulous person singing in the video below is my Mother-in-Law who blogs at HomesMSP about real estate and the Minneapolis/St Paul area.

Each Wednesday in a feature called Wednesdays Unplugged she posts about our family and a recipe from our weekly family dinner night.

Interested in joining us on the Caldecott Medal and Honor Book Reading Challenge? Find out more here.

Caldecott Challenge Update: 1938-1941

After getting loads of early Medal and Honor books from my local public library, I renewed my effort to read the Caldecott books in order. I am still focused on the stress free part of this challenge, so have been trying to use my phone (iPhone 4S) as much as possible to document my progress: camera (hence some blurry pics), video, blogger app, goodreads app, etc.

I was hoping to utilize the Animoto app to put images into a short movie right from my phone, but it only allowed 12 pictures without text with a free educator account. So I resorted to actually transferring pictures to my computer to use iMovie - still reasonably stress free for me.

I am looking forward to adding to this as I go.



I have gotten distracted with other reading I wanted to fit in before the ALA announcements at the end of this month, so my progress so far (not counting those have read before the challenge) is only:
17 read / 289 to go.

I really been enjoying all the wonderful conversation on Twitter at #nerdcott and on goodreads.
Thank you to everyone who is joining in - what a wonderful reading community!


Interested in joining us on the Caldecott Medal and Honor Book Reading Challenge? Find out more here.